They may not be as powerful as BBC, CNN or Fox News in propagating hate. Neither can they beat Aljazeera as an underground Western Media, while posing as a ‘Muslim and Arab friendly Media’. But considering their numbers in millions, they surely can turn the tide and pay the west in its own coin of ‘Hate Propaganda’, through internet.

Imagine that you are a netizen in Beijing with an account on China’s version of twitter, Weibo. And imagine that of the ten people you follow on Weibo, one of them works for Beijing’s propaganda office.

Well, that’s just what Beijing’s Vice Mayor, Lu Wei, who also happens to be the city’s propaganda chief said last Thursday, according to the Beijing News.

Lu urged the city’s 2.06 million propaganda employees, or one in ten people in Beijing, to open accounts on social media. The move, he said, would help to “spread positive energy” by influencing opinion on hot topics. Of the group, 60,000 work for the government. Two million are enlisted civilians.

Sarah Cook, a senior researcher with US-based Freedom House says despite the online propaganda army, it might not break people’s trust in social media.

[Sarah Cook, Freedom on the Net and East Asia, Freedom House]:
“If, you know, if you’re getting your news, right, from someone you know, who you know has a track record, who’ve you’ve been following for a while, who you know is a professor, you know is either an activist, or a lawyer; someone who for whatever reason you’re trusting, right, the information that they’re sharing, I don’t think that that would really change.”

Still, Cook says this group of paid propaganda workers can foster distrust.

[Sarah Cook, Freedom on the Net and East Asia, Freedom House]:
“At first when people would just write, would write comments that were very pro-government or pro Party, then they would get called out on it by the other bloggers who would basically call them the “Fifty-Cent Party” and would say, ‘Oh, you’re just shilling for the government.’ But then you start to see things that are much more insidious, where people are producing misinformation; so they’ll make up some kind of fact and say something is going on.”

Finding out how many propaganda officials are amongst them did not go down well with Chinese netizens.

According to the Chinese edition of the Epoch Times newspaper, one blogger wrote “So horrible! One tenth of Beijing’s population are propaganda workers.”

And it can’t be cheap to maintain this large group of people. Referring to the “Fifty-Cent Party”, another blogger wrote “No wonder we have such high taxes!”

The number 2.06 million has now been censored on Weibo. That’s the same with comments relating to the Beijing News article.

Holly Kellum, NTD News, New York